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Rapid Review

THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 247-253
© 2001 National Communication Association

Rhetoric and the American President

Kathryn M. Olson

Richard J. Ellis, editor. Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 288 pages. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

In his 1996 introduction to Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, Martin J. Medhurst cogently differentiated the constructs of the “rhetorical presidency” and “presidential rhetoric.” The “rhetorical presidency,” the much narrower concept, refers specifically to the prevalence of presidents’ direct popular appeals to the citizenry “over the heads” of Washington decision-makers; “presidential rhetoric” envelops all aspects of presidents’ symbol use, regardless of audience (Congress, international bodies, posterity), purpose, outcome, or perceived desirability. The “rhetorical presidency” has a pejorative cast among those political scientists, historians, and government scholars who developed the term (Ceaser, Thurow, Tulis, and Bessette; Tulis Rhetorical Presidency; “Revising”). To them, the “rhetorical presidency” represents a distasteful overlay on a pre-existing, more honorable presidency rooted in the Founders’ ideology, a shadowy contaminate that grew into a second constitution circumventing the original Constitution’s checks on presidential demagoguery. As Medhurst observed, for Jeffrey K. Tulis and his colleagues, “rhetoric is understood as a substitute for, or as a false form of, political action rather than as being, in and of itself, a type of action — symbolic action” and refers “primarily to emotional appeals to ignorant audiences” (xiv).

Tulis’s 1996 revision qualified the implication that popular appeals are always bad — since they are “indispensable for periodic political needs” like wars or economic crises — but reaffirmed the view that a “routinized” practice of presidents appealing directly to “the people” is problematic (“Revising” 4). Despite Tulis’s redemptive attempts to re-vision “a new form of popular rhetoric . . . that is at once popular and constitutional,” his original assumptions that a primary Constitutional presidency and a secondary, superimposed “rhetorical presidency” involving significant popular address usually serve “competing,” not complementary, logics (“Revising” 5; see also Speaking 221-22) and that popular rhetorical appeals presumptively are unprincipled survive to pass unreflectively into the book at hand, Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, edited by Richard J. Ellis. This collection’s essays fall primarily into two categories: (1) those offering qualifications on or reservations regarding Tulis’s argument that Woodrow Wilson legitimized the emergent “rhetorical presidency” (either by proposing alternative contenders for the dubious honor of being known as the Chief Executive in whom the “rhetorical presidency” came to fruition or by objecting to the adequacy of and/or remedying Tulis’s 1987 treatment of Wilson and forerunner Theodore Roosevelt), and (2) those developing the importance of various antecedent rhetorical forms, historical moments, or presidential leadership theories that their authors feel Tulis overlooked or short-changed.

Since reviews of Ellis’s volume already appear in both general interest publications and those specially devoted to political science or history (Harrison; Mohr; Saffell; Zarefsky), this review in a Communication journal reflects my reading as a rhetorician without assessing the book’s value for readers with other priorities. Clarifying the review’s angle of vision is very important as a context to the following comments; any book’s uses and usefulness, as well as the allure or evaluation of its claims and evidence, always depend — and, in this case, very self-consciously — on the reader’s background, approach, and long-term interests. Likewise, readers may acknowledge authors’ intentions and purposes without necessarily sharing them and may find defensible textual uses that the authors did not foresee because they proceed from different perspectives with different virtues and blindspots. So, my goals here are to avoid duplicating the opinions already available by writing on behalf of a discipline unrepresented in this book’s author list and to assist other rhetorical scholars in expeditiously employing this book.

In spite of its numerous intellectual contributions, Speaking to the People is a frustrating book for rhetoricians, especially given its title. As this review’s initial two paragraphs foreshadow, any collection whose conceptual bond is the “rhetorical presidency” inherently will arouse reservations for Communication scholars, especially those studying “presidential rhetoric.” One problem is the unexamined, largely undefended assumption that a president’s popular appeals can be boxed off from (and subordinated to) the rest of his or her symbol use. Related to this concern is the book’s implicit continuation of Tulis’s overly simplistic notion that, when a president engages in popular appeals, “the only salient rhetorical issue” from that president’s perspective is whether persuading a larger public will serve self-interest by successfully securing his or her policy objectives (“Revising” 9). Even looking solely at those studies that treat direct popular appeals and privilege a traditional rhetor-centered approach, the rich variety of presidential rhetoric scholarship challenges this assumption. Presidential epideictic and forensic appeals to the citizenry are commonplace and have been investigated as thoroughly as presidents’ deliberative addresses; existing scholarship on rhetorical legacies, personae, and genres demonstrates that presidential self-interest may be advanced by popular appeals unrelated to policy-making, that reasons or responsibilities other than self-interest motivate some direct presidential appeals or attenuate self-interest’s influence on the rhetor, and that actual presidential appeals mutually interact with larger political processes and institutional demands in ways that justifiably may reshape all three. In fairness, the foregoing conceptual reservations apply to most writings in the “rhetorical presidency” tradition.

More capaciously, rhetoricians familiar with Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives (esp. 323-401) may bridle at the “rhetorical presidency’s” foundational assumption that one would (and would think it productive to) try to conceptualize the existence of some constitutionally-instituted presidency both conceptually distinct from, and innately superior to, a rhetorical one. Granted, this last concern uses the term “rhetoric” in a broader sense, but one that encompasses the narrower view favored by “rhetorical presidency” theorists. If one is at all persuaded by Burke’s argument that constitutions are the ultimate rhetorical act, so thoroughly steeped in symbols that they cannot be appreciated without a more expansive rhetorical perspective, one will resist limiting the notion of “rhetoric” to one sub-category of “public address” or granting that somehow “non-rhetorical” institutions and interpretations can be derived from a working constitution. From a rhetorician’s viewpoint, I found myself dreaming about the potential insights had the great intellectual labor invested here in pinpointing exactly when and from whence a particular rhetorical practice emerged or in winnowing “rhetorical” elements of the presidency from “non-rhetorical” ones been lavished on the questions that these detailed historical investigations raise. It would be unfair for me to criticize a book for not doing what it never set out to do. I raise the issue only because these authors sometimes come tantalizingly close to, but stop just short of, engaging the intriguing rhetorical puzzles posed by their work when one assumes that rhetoric always pervaded the U.S. presidency, but constantly transfigures to meet fresh needs or that enduring constitutions symbolically must enmesh stability and dynamism to provide space for later rhetorical adaptations without undermining the constituted community’s sense of identity (see Olson 1986). Thus, Speaking offers rhetorically inclined readers some heuristic launching points for future studies because its authors sometimes stop just where rhetoricians may find it useful to begin their work.

 Taken on its own terms, Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective also invites several unique objections. First, editor Ellis, who shares in the acknowledgement’s first paragraph that he inherited rather than initiated this project (vii), does a valiant job in the introductory essay of trying to give the collection some conceptual unity. However, that unifying thread quickly gets lost as one proceeds through subsequent chapters, and even Tulis’s generous and thoughtfully reflective conclusion cannot restore it. Some of the later chapters pay such scant attention to even “window-dressing” their arguments as related to presidents’ popular appeals that they seem out of place, given the book’s title and Ellis’s introduction.

Second, and perhaps related to the previous comment, the book does not make good on its title’s apparent priorities (and so initial seductiveness even to rhetoricians familiar with the “rhetorical presidency’s” built-in negative judgment). Technically, the title and the most cursory acquaintance with its unifying concept’s history both imply that the chapters’ primary foci will involve presidents’ direct popular appeals (written or oral). In fact, only one essay, Mel Laracey’s treatment of the presidential newspaper, deals substantially with texts linking a sitting president to the citizenry; Tulis’s concluding chapter rebuts even that judgment by questioning (for other purposes) contemporary citizens’ awareness that these publications “spoke for” a president with his approval, since the opinions never appeared under his name. Ellis’s very good chapter on the historical shift from nomination acceptance letters to speeches will be of interest to public address devotees, though it is technically just outside the “rhetorical presidency’s” self-imposed conceptual boundaries because it deals with candidates’, not office-holders’, rhetoric and features ceremonial and/or promissory discourse ostensibly directed to party elites rather than policy appeals directed to a general citizenry. Other chapters deal with subjects rather tangential to presidents “speaking to the people” (making cases regarding apparent discrepancies between Wilson’s academic theory of presidential leadership and his practice as office holder; presidential “intentions” presumably omitted in or obscured by their popular appeals; particular presidents’ relationships with Washington policy-makers and party elites that influenced the presidential institution), but still of interest to readers who embrace a broader view of “rhetoric” and rhetorical history.

A third shortcoming, one that will be felt intensely by rhetoricians, is these essays’ prioritization of evidence. Quite simply, what presidents actually say to “the people” ranks dead last as evidence, even when it would be relevant. Maybe this turn should be expected since, according to the heritage of the book’s unifying concept, popular presidential discourse automatically is suspect, but I found it distracting. In the majority of the essays, virtually every other type of evidence — from other secondary scholarly sources to presidents’ academic and autobiographical writings to perceived consistency with the Founders’ thoughts — is presumed more credible and better able to explain empirically established outcomes than primary textual evidence from or patterns detected in these presidents’ direct popular appeals. Tulis’s critique in the book’s final chapter is telling with respect to this constant discounting of presidential rhetoric itself as important evidence; there he chastises certain contributors for “ignor[ing] what presidents say they are doing” (217) in favor of attending to what they demonstrably are doing in their popular rhetoric, regardless of how (or whether) they explicitly theorize it. For most Speaking contributors, the former clearly trumps the latter as more authoritative evidence; for most rhetoricians, the latter will trump the former as more authentic, and consequently they may see some authors’ explanations as incomplete or perhaps esoterically parochial. The book’s extensive index, however, helps one quickly locate those chapters that actually cite presidents’ rhetoric to “the people.”

General and specific rhetorical grievances now exorcised, this book’s merits emerge. In light of 2000’s cliff-hanger presidential election, David K. Nichols’s discussion of the electoral college’s history and Ellis and Stephen Kirk’s treatment of winners’ claims to a “presidential mandate” as a power-generating move are enlightening. Although reviewer Anthony J. Mohr of the Los Angeles Superior Court found the book unexciting — especially the sections that “search[ed] newspapers for speech patterns” (730) — these are precisely the kind of passages whose textual evidence will engage rhetoricians. And many Speaking chapters offer insight into non-presidential rhetoric, for instance Senator Henry Clay’s Bank discourse. Despite Tulis’s concluding reaction to it, I also appreciated Gerald Gamm’s and Renee M. Smith’s empirical chapter tracking the coincidence of certain campaign strategy changes with mutations in presidential rhetoric. For readers not invested in debating which president deserves the most blame for the “rhetorical presidency’s” emergence, this essay’s tracking of presidents’ “discretionary” policy-oriented communication with the mass public from 1877 to 1929 adds nice depth to the story of shifting public expectations for presidential rhetoric. Finally, in a peculiar way, rhetoricians may find hope in the volume’s inability to sustain a tight focus on the “rhetorical presidency”; perhaps it signals that some fine presidential scholars from other disciplines are chaffing under this concept’s restrictive, negative nature and soon may be open to an infusion of more broadly rhetorical formulations.

Kathryn M. Olson is associate professor of communication  at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.

Ceaser, James W., Glen E. Thurow, Jeffrey K. Tulis, and Joseph M. Bessette. “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 158-71.

Harrison, S. L. Rev. of Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis. Choice Jul./Aug. 1999: 2019.

Medhurst, Martin J. “Introduction: A Tale of Two Constructs: The Rhetorical Presidency Versus Presidential Rhetoric.” Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency. Ed. Martin J. Medhurst. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1996. xi-xxvi.

Mohr, Anthony J. Rev. of Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (1999): 728-30.

Olson, Kathryn M. “Toward Uniting a Fellowship Divided: A Dramatistic Analysis of the Constitution-writing Process of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.” Diss. Northwestern University, 1986.

Saffell, David C. Rev. of Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis. Perspectives on Political Science 28 (1999): 153-54.

Tulis, Jeffrey K. “Revising the Rhetorical Presidency.” Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency. Ed. Martin J. Medhurst. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1996. 3-14.

---. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.